Many aspects of coral reefs are changing in the face of increasing stress, but some are changing more quickly than others. Benthic communities can change in a season, as when corals die in a typhoon or bleaching event, whereas other aspects of the system, such as structural complexity, may take decades to shift. Reef fishes’ responses to benthic change may depend on their sensitivity to rapidly-changing dynamic factors relative to more slow-moving static ones, and those sensitivities can be estimated from the spatial distribution of current populations. We collected extensive spatially-explicit data on fish and benthic organisms to model fish community biomass across multiple spatial scales to determine the relative importance of dynamic versus static variables for fish distribution, as well as the ideal scale for predictability. We focused on ecologically important herbivores and species targeted by local fishing. We validated our statistical results by testing their predictive power on new data. We found that most groups were more associated with static rather than dynamic variables, with overall fish biomass tending to be highest in areas further offshore, closer to reef passes, and with more physical structure. These results suggest that these important fish groups may be resilient to dynamic changes in the benthic state over short timescales.